What I like best about the posts members of the LBC have made about My Sister’s Continent is the in-depth discussion of the fact that none of the characters in the novel are exactly what you’d call “reliable” (I love the vote cast for Kirby’s bowels being the most reliable character in the novel!), and so it being effectively impossible to get at the complete truth of what happened between Kirby, Kendra and their father Henry. This discussion appeals to me for a couple of reasons. The first is that it’s difficult to write a novel in which every character has her or his own view of reality and none of these views obviously supercedes the others in a way that makes it clear what the “author really thinks.” It’s difficult to know if one has succeeded in doing that, after working very hard to do it, and so when I read that bowels may be the only thing the reader of MSC can count on, I am oddly and extremely gratified that something in my intentions “worked” and managed to translate to the page. I’m also pleased because, after working so hard to achieve this effect while crafting the novel, it was one of the prime things editors objected to when my agent was trying to SELL the novel . . . which, as you might imagine, was a little disheartening. Sometimes it was as simple as saying that the ending was too ambiguous and that readers wouldn’t be satisfied without “knowing what really happened,” but other times the criticism was more insidious, directed at Kirby and Kendra as characters. What I heard most was that Kirby was not “good enough” to be the “good twin” to Kendra’s bad twin. She did not fit the good girl mold: she was pissed off; she was a liar; she had icky diarrhea; she was a lesbian (though of course no editor actually cited her lesbianism as a cause of her not seeming like a good girl.) As a result, editors said, they did “not know who to believe” in the story, and, apparently, without being able to believe one character implicitly, to the exclusion (and vilification?) of the others, they were unable to “sympathize” with Kirby the way they “wanted to.”
For the record, I am not trying to dismiss these editors’ opinions. I’m an editor too, and I understand the importance of needing to sympathize with a character in order to want to publish a story or book. It is no doubt true that few readers want to devour books where they have no sympathy for the main character, and fiction is an incredibly subjective business: if a given editor didn’t sympathize with Kirby (or Kendra, forever branded the “evil twin” or “bad girl”), then by all means it made sense that s/he wouldn’t want to buy the book. Any writer needs to understand that, unless you are Dan Brown, most editors will NOT want to buy your book, and it will take a long time to find the one who does, and many writers will never find anyone who does; that is fact #1 of the writing life. Rather, what I question is the underlying assumption editors apparently make that in order to be “sympathetic” you have to be . . . well, apparently 100% truthful at all times. What was even more puzzling to me was the fact that editors expected Kirby and Kendra, who are, after all, identical twins, to be complete opposites from one another: if Kendra lies, Kirby tells the truth; if Kendra is sexually adventurous and self-destructive, Kirby is moral and always perfectly rational and sane. I am not a twin. But I lived with identical twins throughout college, just the three of us, and I had a lot of opportunity to observe twinship in its natural habitat. (I even got to watch them chase each other around the apartment with scissors.) What I deduced from that experience is that two people who share the exact same genetics are not likely to be polar opposites. Yes, one twin is usually the leader—but what, in twinship, passes for being stronger, prettier, smarter, braver, is usually barely perceptible as difference to those outside the twin unit. Identical twins are usually very similar—though of course no two people are exactly alike. And so, if Kendra was anorexic, pill-popping and masochistic, it made sense that Kirby would also suffer from emotionally induced physical ailments, hanker after a prescription of Valium as her motivation for going to therapy, and not find herself fully satisfied within the confines of a traditional sexual relationship. If Kendra’s entire life is built around keeping secrets that may not even be true, it makes sense that Kirby would lie to Dr. Friedland and Aris and just about everyone else around her, especially herself. And if a reader does not like Kirby because of these things, that is certainly the reader’s prerogative . . . but to not like her because her twin sister was supposed to have a monopoly on all aberrant behavior and Kirby was supposed to justify Kendra’s deviance by herself being a saint . . . well, that seems to me a bit illogical, and definitely not a very accurate understanding of twinship.
As the editor of a book press myself, it is always tempting for me to veer off at a point like this and start pontificating about the facile and reductive nature of mainstream publishing these days (and it is true, I’ll permit myself to add, that the minute I sent My Sister’s Continent off to independent presses, I never heard another word about the good twin/bad twin debate)—but really, what I want to talk about here is the issue of reliability: in characters and in fiction in general. What I want to talk about is the issue of subjectivity, and the permeability of truth. Much has been made of these subjects in literary theory, and there is little I can add to that discussion. But what hit me closer to home, recently, was my husband telling me about a psychological study he read, in which it was concluded that basically everyone believes him/herself to be nicer, more moral, and more trustworthy than the people around him. The “truth” of this study is fairly obvious: people all secretly believe ourselves superior to our neighbors, but we cannot all BE superior. Some of us are, obviously, wrong. Some of us are, in fact, more dishonest, backstabbing, petty and cruel than our neighbors. Some of us are assholes. But apparently, we do not know it. Apparently we are a world of individuals all going around thinking our reality is valid, and most of us can give a pretty good song and dance as to why this is so. Ask anyone and they can tell you why their mother-in-law is a psycho, why their landlord is a capitalist pig, why their boss is a tyrant, why their husband is a jerk, why their kids are ungrateful brats. Meanwhile, the philandering husband can easily wax poetic about why he has to cheat because his wife is a frigid nag. Meanwhile the mother-in-law can give you an earful about her spoiled daughter-in-law who thinks the world revolves around her and can’t even be bothered to cook, or her son-in-law who can't hold a job and always goes to sleep at family gatherings. Meanwhile the kids are giving their shrinks an earful about the emotional abuse they suffered at the hands of the philandering deadbeat and the martyr nag. And so on. This is apparent to us all on a gut level. And so when we read a novel, the moment we hear the first person voice of our narrator, the moment we suspend our disbelief in the construct of novels in general and tell ourselves that a trusted friend is whispering this story in our ears, at the very least it would seem we should not trust our narrative guide any MORE than we would our friends. Our narrator may be willing to give us the shirt off her figurative back; she may be willing to come over and help us move our couch to our new apartment—but, just like our real friends, she is probably not going to be willing to see the truth about herself just for our sakes. She will hold on to her own perceptions, to the lies she’s been telling herself since childhood, and we will have to slowly pry them out. This, of course, is the very kind of thing Freud gave us a language for (along, unfortunately, with all the misogynistic baggage that came with that language.) This is the terrain of our subconscious minds: the things we hide from ourselves and our loved ones. Fictional characters, of course, do it too.
Or at least they should. One of the things that differentiates literary fiction from “genre” fiction is the assumption that literary fiction will continue to yield new facets and revelations and pleasures upon second, third, tenth readings, whereas genre fiction exists primarily to entertain, quick-and-dirty, and so often relies on formulas and punch lines: the whodunit; the who-is-she-going-to-marry? Once we know who the killer—or the groom—is, there is little incentive to re-read the novel. This is one of the prime criterion we use at Other Voices when deciding whether to publish a story: will the piece be as strong once we know the ending? In a literary novel or story, instead of relying on the detective to solve a crime, the reader is a psychological and linguistic detective who continues to uncover truths and nuances upon each reading. A literary novel—the best of them, like Morrison and Faulkner and Roy—is somewhat circular in nature, even if the plot is linear. It does not have a clear “end point” at which the reader can sigh with satisfaction of now “knowing everything,” put down the book and re-enter the world. A literary novel probes and disturbs and stays with us. We revisit it in our minds, trying to work out certain aspects and reach conclusions, much like the way we replay actual conversations in our minds, imagining the dozens of things we might have said other than the one, comparatively lame thing we actually said. A literary novel should be a haunting thing. This is the pay-off, for reading some 300 pages instead of plopping down on the couch to watch Survivor. Our reward is a haunting. Human beings, or at least a certain subset of human beings—we who still love books despite proclamations for more than 100 years that the novel is now “dead”—at the core of it love to be haunted by people who do not exist. Literary characters are our real ghosts.
My new novel, A Beautiful Violence, which my agent has just started shopping around to those big corporate houses I so love to criticize in any public forum I can get my hands on (yeah, but you know, they do pay, and after 11 years at a nonprofit lit mag, with a first novel from a tiny avant-garde indie, you can damn well bet I’d like to get my hands on a check), also ends on an ambiguous note: on a murder that may or may not have been the narrator’s fault. No one ever learns the truth, including the narrator herself. I’m not sure why I did this, given all the grief I got from editors over the ambiguity of My Sister’s Continent: over the lack of a black and white “answer.” In my defense I can only say that this is the kind of novel I love to read—the kind I devour and toss and turn over. I remember reading Atwood’s The Blind Assassin while on a residency at Ragdale, and being so caught up in its puzzles that I found myself actually reading the book aloud to myself in my dinky little twin-bedded room, hardly aware I was doing it—I was trying to absorb every nuance so as to decide for myself what had transpired. I can only say that I am a bit fan of the unconscious. I can only say that I guess I don’t want a fat check as badly as I want to unsettle things: my characters, my readers, myself. These days, I think it is fair to say that most writers don’t like things that are easy, and most readers don’t either, no matter what big house editors believe. These days, the act of reading itself (in a time when according to the NEA, less than half of Americans have read a single book in the past year—not even a cook book!) is a complicated, rebellious act. So I can’t help but believe that complicated, rebellious readers deserve characters and situations as complex as themselves.
My Sister’s Continent has a comparatively small cast of characters compared with some novels. But in the end, they are somewhat like a feuding Greek chorus, each with his or her own opinion on what has transpired. Kirby, of course, changes her story each time the wind blows. One moment she believes Kendra was raped by their father; the next she believes Kendra attempted to seduce Henry but failed. As to her own past, she insists she knows her history and that she was never the victim of incest . . . but she cannot recall anything about the night her sister found her with those bloody sheets, and so permits herself moments of doubt. As for Kendra, she is afflicted with none of her sister’s doubts: this is, perhaps, the one area in which the twins are most different. Kendra is a character plagued by certainty: her sister was molested by their father, and so she threw herself at him in order to save Kirby. She thought she was tougher, that she could do this with impunity, but after the consummation occurred, something in her fell apart and she was left what she had always been: a young girl, not a warrior or a savior; a young girl who had been raped by her alcoholic father. Ah, but if you are Dr. Friedland, then Kendra’s certainty is not in and of itself convincing, since Kendra is mentally unsound and delusional, and delusional people can be certain about any number of things that never really happened. Yes, Kendra threw herself at her father, but not to save Kirby: she did it because she was jealous of Leigh Kelsey, his mistress, and wanted his attentions for herself. Henry, of course, rejected Kendra's advances, but the incident was traumatic enough that he stopped drinking and confessed it to his psychiatrist. Then there's Michael Kelsey, who thinks he has “figured out” Kendra’s history of sexual abuse before ever even seeing her journals, believes her side of the story—but of course, if Kendra is delusional, then certainly she and Michael have been enmeshed in a folie à deux from the get-go. Michael, while believing Kendra was raped by Henry, does not believe she contracted AIDS from the encounter, as she seems convinced she has—and as Kirby fears she has, thinking her sister has run off to die. Instead he offers the vision that Kendra ran off to Europe and obtained dual citizenship by marrying some European man or other: a vision that is pretty convincing, given Dr. Friedland’s point that if Kendra had HIV, some abnormality in her cell count would surely have been noticed while she was in the hospital after rupturing her stomach. The reader might be fairly convinced that Kendra is not sick (at least not with a sexually transmitted disease contracted from her father), unless one looks too closely at Leigh Kelsey’s possible suicide. If Leigh died in a random car accident, then probably it has nothing to do with Kendra and is just bad luck—another of Michael’s dead women. But if Leigh running off to Colorado and leaving her daughter with Michael is as out of character and strange as Kendra believes—if her sudden death almost immediately afterwards is a bit too coincidental for comfort, as Kirby suspects—then perhaps Leigh did have AIDS and chose to end her own life rather than come clean about it and risk a slow, debilitating death. And if Leigh is sick, it means Henry was already infected when he had sex with Kendra, and she might be sick too—IF he ever had sex with Kendra at all, that is. And so it goes. The only way to know for sure, about the abuse or the infection, would be to monitor Kendra and see if she gets ill. But she has run away, removing herself from Kirby’s—and the reader’s—scrutiny.
People often ask me, since I am the writer, what I think happened to Kendra. It’s a complicated question because, in the series of short stories that grew into this novel, Kendra lived beyond the plot of this novel, and even eventually returned to Chicago from where she’d been living in London. And so, that Kendra, that other-Kendra, is still out there somewhere, living on the pages of literary magazines (in some box of back issues!). But the truth is that everything changed when I transitioned from those stories to this novel, and I don’t always know what I think happened to Kendra anymore. Sometimes she has started a small dance school in France, where she has married some grown-up version of a long-haired musician, and they have a couple of kids, and nobody knows her past. Sometimes she dies in London, more likely of an intentional or unintentional OD than of AIDS, in a squat somewhere, having lived on the fringe so long that her family in Chicago is never even tracked down and notified. Sometimes she returns to Chicago after Henry’s death—most of the time, she does not. When she does, she sometimes turns up infected, a long-term HIV survivor. But that end is too clear cut for me most days, and so, as Michael predicted, Kendra usually never sets foot in Chicago again—never calls at 2 a.m., and remains the ghost that haunts Kirby and Michael both, as well as Henry. Because Henry, too, may not be sure what happened back when the twins were 17. He was drunk, after all, and had been for a long time. He may truly believe he never raped Kendra because he blacked it out, or he may be lying about that. Or, he may be telling the truth. Henry may be guilty of extramarital sex with Leigh Kelsey, and of being a drunk, but of little else. It is possible that he is the most tragic character of all: losing his beloved daughter while he’s terminally ill, over a phantom crime that never occurred.
My husband is a fan of Stephen Colbert, and so we have a new word in our household: truthiness. Colbert satirically defines this as something that feels true in the gut, irrespective of facts and evidence. And so, to that end, the business of fiction IS the business of truthiness, really. Kirby, Kendra, Dr. Friedland, Michael, Leigh and Henry (and even Gail, who thinks Kendra is merely an “emotional terrorist”) all believe they can feel the truth in their guts—and when Kirby can’t quite feel the truth, her bowels feel it for her. That their truths are all different doesn’t matter quite so much. Like the subjects of any psychological study, they all believe their own truth is the one that is real, and that the others are mistaken, not as smart or honest or sane. Now that their story is out there on the page, even if I did believe myself certain of what had happened, my version would just be another case of truthiness. The wonderful and scary thing about actually having your novel published is that you are no longer the utmost authority on it. It has entered a realm independent of you, so that you become merely one more voice in the chorus too.
Gina, I'm glad you went deeper with the unreliable narrator/character idea. It's interesting to me to read the backstory to a story (not being the type to read reviews or article on a book prior to reading the actual book, when I enjoy something, I like to learn everything I can about it). That Kendra could have taken so many paths after she left the novel is what makes the ending so intriguing, though I suppose keeping the reader guessing isn't something that makes most editors comfortable. Each path then changes the paths of the others -- I can see why you wrote so many possibilities.
And, you're right, finding something that can be re-read and still fresh is a pure joy.
Posted by: Kassia | May 10, 2006 at 02:46 PM
Gina, thank you for not being upset that I thought Kirby's bowels the most reliable character in the book. Great job blogging this week. Thanks!
Posted by: Jeff | May 10, 2006 at 05:57 PM